'Tambo: Life in an Andean VillagePerhaps the best way to sharpen one's power's of observation is to be a stranger in a strange land. Julia Meyerson was one such stranger during a year in the village of 'Tambo, Peru, where her husband was conducting anthropological fieldwork. Though sometimes overwhelmed by the differences between Quechua and North American culture, she still sought eagerly to understand the lifeways of 'Tambo and to find her place in the village. Her vivid observations, recorded in this field journal, admirably follow Henry James's advice: "Try to be one of the people upon whom nothing is lost." With an artist's eye, Meyerson records the daily life of 'Tambo—the cycles of planting and harvest, the round of religious and cultural festivals, her tentative beginnings of friendship and understanding with the Tambinos. The journal charts her progress from tolerated outsider to accepted friend as she and her husband learn and earn, the roles of daughter and son in their adopted family. With its wealth of ethnographic detail, especially concerning the lives of Andean women, 'Tambo will have great value for students of Latin American anthropology. In addition, scholars preparing to do fieldwork anywhere will find it a realistic account of both the hardships and the rewards of such study. |
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... side of a mountain ; from the yard , you look out into open space to the face of an- other mountain in the distance . ' Tambo's fields and pasture lands are all around the village , both above and below it on the mountain , and there ...
... side of the door was " our " band , that of Ayllu Nayhua , and we women sat along this same side of the area in front of the door . Another band came soon to stand near ours , another team of dancers - boys dressed like ours - and ...
... side of the rock away from the rivers is a deeply worn depression where some giant might have braced his knee to hurl boulders across the river at the mountains on the other side . We could see the gap in the wall of mountain and specu ...